SEO Title

The title tag or your article/website page is very important both for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Humans. Why?

Because basically it gives viewers, readers and search engines the idea of what that web page is about.

If you don’t have a title inside of your webpage, the search engines will just pick whatever they want from your page and display it as a title, which is wrong.

So, you shouldn’t have empty titles, nor duplicate ones. That’s why you should make sure that for each page you assign a clear, specific and original title.

You should think of your title as a short commercial message meant to attract the attention of those who search online.

It should be appealing, written in good English, interesting, and it should render a summary of your article or a brief description of the topic.

Titles. An intro.

Titles, technically called title elements, define the title of a document.

They are often used on search engine result pages to display preview snippets for a given page.

Code Example:

<head>
 <title>Example Title</title>
 </head>

The importance of titles for 100% SEO

Titles appear in 3 important places: browsers, search engine results pages and external websites.

1. Browsers. Titles often show up both in the top of a browser’s chrome and in the tabs.

2. Search engine results pages.

The essential element to tackle here is keywords. If you include keywords (and you should, as we are going to see) in the title, the search engines will highlight then in the results, if a user has performed a query using the keywords.

So, titles, if you include keywords, have a direct influence on click-behavior.

3. External websites, such as social media sites, will use the title tag of your web page when they link anchor text.

Optimize the title tag

There’s no clear rule of how you should optimize your titles, but I want to give you a few basic steps, and if you have WordPress, an amazing tool: The Squirrly WordPress SEO Plugin.

The Squirrly SEO Live Assistant will help you every step of the way, giving you SEO advice while you are writing the article. So, it will help you optimize your title in 3 steps:

Use the core keyword in your title. It’s best to also include the secondary, but it’s not essential. However, the core one it’s a MUST. Also, learn that if you place the keyword on first position it will increase your Google Index Position, as the keyword will appear in the URL.
Use between 10-75 chars. Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters of a title tag. While the length of your title is highly debatable( W3C recommends maximum 64 characters, Bing around 65, Yahoo 67), you should try not to write more than 75 characters, because Yahoo and Bing start cutting off the letters at the end when you do it.
Make the title different from your domain name.

I also want to recommend to you some great tools proposed by Moz.com:

Other Related Tools

MozBar
The MozBar SEO toolbar lets you see relevant metrics in your browser as you surf the web.
Open Site Explorer
Open Site Explorer is a free tool that gives webmasters the ability to analyze up to 10,000 links to any site or page on the web via the Mozscape web index.

External Resources

HTML Title Tag
The official W3Schools documentation on titles.
<title>: the most important element of a quality Web page
This is a short explaining titles, hosted and produced by the Quality Assurance Interest Group at W3C.

The Beginner’s Guide to SEO
Moz’s comprehensive guide to the practice of search engine optimization for those unfamiliar with the subject.
A Visual Guide to Keyword Targeting and On-Page SEO
This in-depth examination of on-page factors helps to get your page optimized for maximum SEO visibility.

Now, you know why you should optimize your title tags and how to do it!

If you use WordPress and you’d like to optimize your content, you can start using Squirrly SEO WordPress Plugin. Go to the link install the plugin and you’ll get awesome advice and easy-to-do solutions on optimizing every piece of content, including the title tags.